Excitement is growing as NASA works to launch its first manned flight to the moon in more than five decades. The Artemis II mission, which will take four astronauts on a ten-day journey around the moon, could launch as early as February 6th.
NASA just released a cinematic trailer for the highly anticipated mission. You can watch it using the player embedded at the top of this page.
“We’ll see things no human has ever seen…Exploring ourselves is the core of who we are…it’s part of being human,” one of the crew members, Victor Glover, says in the video.
Glover will fly with NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
Their Orion spacecraft will be launched into orbit by NASA’s giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which arrived at the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida last weekend.
After several days in an elliptical Earth orbit in which the astronauts will test Orion’s performance under manual control, the crew continues toward the Moon, coming within 3,300 miles of the Moon’s surface as it orbits Earth’s closest natural satellite.
“We’re going to turn the spacecraft so that you have the best view of the moon in 50 years,” Jeff Radigan, Artemis II’s senior flight director, said in a recent NASA documentary about the mission. “We want to make sure we get the videos of the moon that we all want to see here on Earth, and that all of our systems work on the other side of the moon too.”
After ten days in space, the Orion and its crew will sink into the ocean at the end of a major mission that will pave the way for Artemis III, which aims to put the first humans on the lunar surface since 1972.
